The Gulf Disaster: a geologists take

[Zz Yzx]

I'm a geologist by trade. In a former life I spent a few years working oil rigs, a couple of those on offshore rigs. Here's my analysis and worst fears, based on what I've gleaned from the news reports.

Analysis:

1. To save time/$, they didn't circulate the mud in the borehole ("bottoms up") before they set the liner. Had they done so, they would have identified the disasterous conditions before the disaster.

1. To save time/$, they "hung" the liner (ran it only from the bottom of the previous casing, rather than run it all the way up inside the previous casing to the BOP).

2. To save time/$, they used only 6 liner centralizers rather than the "recommended" 21 (recommended by whom I don't know). If the hole deviated at all from vertical (which I'm sure it did), that'd mean that in places, the liner would be placed up against the borehole sidewall rather than through the center of the borehole. That'd make it very hard to get an adequate cement seal of consistent thickness and strength along the entire length of the liner.

1. To save time/$, they used an inferior cement mix.

2. To save time/$, they didn't run a "cement bond log". To do this, they run a special tool on a wire line through the recently cemented interval, and log the qyaulity of the cement bond between the liner and the formation.

1. To save time/$, they displaced the drilling mud in the riser (above the BOP up to the drill rig on the surface) with sea water before the inferior cement had completely set, and without the normal plug in the casing below the BOP. This would drastically reduce the pressure head on the formation, and allow formation fluids to enter the borehole.

Now my "worst case" fear:

The bad cement job outside the liner failed; the gas/oil in the formation, under intense pressure (could be as high as 50,000 psi!) blew out and eroded the cement and possibly the liner, allowing it to flow unimpeded and expand quickly due to the pressure release, into the annular space outside the liner, and possibly into the liner, and into the previous casing. THE WORST WORST CASE: if they were to cap the well at the BOP, the pressure would overwhelm the cement-formation seal at the previous casing (where they hung the liner), and break down the higher formations and cement, and flow unimpeded outside the previous casing and BOP to the seafloor surface (cf: the Santa Barbara spill). If that was the case, there would be NO WAY to control the flow until the relief wells are completed (in August). Maybe that's why they "failed" to cap the well at the BOP.

Joe Barton should be hanged.

Sorry, just my $0.02 worth.

-Zz

[Zz Yzx]

I aplogize for forgetting the "OT" leader.

-Zz

[Josepi]

Really?

I aplogize for forgetting the "OT" leader.

-Zz

[Lew Hodgett]

A request:

"Zz Yzx", may I have your permission to forward your comments to federal gov't officials? (Rep Waxman, Sen Boxer & Sen Feinstein as well as whitehouse.gov)

Lew

[Han]

Zz Yzx wrote in news: [e-mail]:

The subject says it all, no need for an OT, IMNSHO. I agree, (as an expert biochemist ) that capping this firing canon will be difficult if not impossible, and we'll have to eat oil until well after the relief wells are finished and used to inject cement at the bottom of the well. BPs only hope is that they can catch more of the oil fired out of the hole by the subsurface pressure.

[Lew Hodgett]

FSA

Lew

[Lobby Dosser]

What are your thoughts on the Catastrophe possibility put forth: that the sea bottom will collapse (due to the BOP falling over) in the immediate vicinity of the well and cause a tsunami - among other cataclysmic issues?

[Steve]

[Steve]

On 2010-06-17 21:04:43 -0400, Zz Yzx said:

Someone else fears the worst, too:

(Long, lots of links)

Quoted from The Oil Drum comment:

"What is likely to happen now?

"Well...none of what is likely to happen is good, in fact...it's about as bad as it gets. I am convinced the erosion and compromising of the entire system is accelerating and attacking more key structural areas of the well, the blow out preventer and surrounding strata holding it all up and together. This is evidenced by the tilt of the blow out preventer and the erosion which has exposed the well head connection. What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don't, they are inviting disaster that much sooner. "Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? ...it won't be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov't must be well aware too, they just are not telling us. "All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of" The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any "cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?....is the only real chance we have left to stop it all. "It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo."

[Maxwell Lol]

1. To save time/$ - they did not use an acoustic switch as a backup system to shut off the valve. This safety mechanism is required by law in other countries (e.g. Norway, Brazil). It is not a requirement in the US.

[J. Clarke]

What part of "valve is broken" are you having trouble with? You can put a billion switches on a light and if the bulb is burnt out none of them are going to make it turn on.

The problem with the valve is not that it did not get the signal to close, the problem is that something is preventing it from closing.

More switches aren't going to make any difference.

[Robatoy]

There was no point putting brakes on a car, the thing crashed anyway. Do you have ANY idea how flawed your logic is? (*fasten your seatbelts, here comes a bus full of straw men*)

[dpb]

Zz Yzx wrote: ...

... I think we get the drift here.

I find it amazing that after spending multi-millions to bring in a helluva a good-producing well, that apparently everyone thinks that at that point the said "Since this is such a lucrative well that's going to produce thousands of barrels of crude a day at a minimum of $75 or $80/bbl, let's risk all that by seeing how shoddily we can now finish off the work..."

Yeah, right...sounds like what would have happened to me... :(

--

[Dave]

You bring a project in on time and under budget, you get the big bonus. You miss your deadline and you go over budget, you don't get that bonus, you don't get that new car, you do get a harsh review at end of the year.

[dpb]

You lose a multi-million dollar cash cow and cost billions on a designed, intended set of operations? Not hardly...

Something went wrong; what, precisely, will only be known when the postmortems are complete and maybe not entirely even then.

It's unlikely imo that any decisions were made expressly for the purpose of shaving corners; that there may have been poor judgment or even engineering mistakes is quite possible but I'd wager there wasn't anything the folks involved did that was any different than they did routinely and had worked in the past.

"Stuff happens..."

That the end result ended up in a botched operation this time doesn't infer intent.

[RicodJour]

No, that's not how the thinking goes. They don't say, "Well, if we don't do this, the thing will blow up." They say, "Well, if we don't do this, the odds of it blowing up are 100,000 to 1." "Okay, I can live with that." But the number and confidence numbers are bogus.

Nobody says, "Oh, let's see what corners can be cut just for the hell of it." What they say is: "If we do this, we'll save this much time and money.", then the corners get cut. There are way too many ex- corners to be explained away for it to be claimed as an unforeseeable accident.

If it were in any other industry they'd also be facing RICO charges. It's amazing how all of the oil companies disaster plans were wholesale cut and paste jobs. They can't exactly argue that they couldn't afford to work up a fookin' disaster plan required by law. Sheesh.

R

[Zz Yzx]

You're stupid and you don't know who was in a position to make the disasterous decisions. The BP company man and the TransOcean tool pusher, BOTH ON THE RIG, under pressure from their respective management, made the decisions. THe BP CEO or any other upper management, who control the "muli-million dollar decisons", were never in the loop. The shortcuts saved them 3 days, at $1,000,000 day, that's a lot of savings for the level employees that made the disasterous decisions.

I'll wager that, of the things the OP listed in the post, all or most differed from previous wells. And I'll wager that the decision making process was flawed and influenced by the cost savings, especially becasue they already a month or more behind.

It will come out in the criminal trials.

-Zz

[krw]

You have it exactly backwards. The brakes *were* applied. The brake cylinders seized.

[Robatoy]

Exactly.

[Martin H. Eastburn]

Hear the one today - TODAY 60 days in - the big skimming boats were allowed in the gulf. The President was holding up an emergency order.

At RITA - it took 2 days. This is a major point that the Administration is allowing the spill to be as nasty as possible (by withholding equipment and burning the oil) and use it for political gain.

How foul can that be !!!

Shame shame.

Mart> Zz Yzx wrote: